There was another outbreak of Neo-Nazi leaflets left on Grover Beach doorsteps last night. It’s not the first time, Grover’s not the first place. It is, of course, heart-breaking. The willful ignorance that is bigotry’s handmaiden is probably impossible to overcome. So I had to make a video, not expecting to convert a White Nationalist, but instead to honor my parents, whose generation dealt with people like these when they finally had no other choice.

For a “cow county” as recently as the 1940 Census, San Luis Obispo County suffered heartbreak infinitely more painful than mine. But that’s what it took to defeat industrialized hatred, whose pinnacle, of course, was in the gas chambers of places like Auschwitz-Birkenau.

It wasn’t that long at all–twenty years?–before Hitler’s boorish, comical NDSAP had graduated from silly pamphlets into a mass movement whose embrace included the finest gun of the terrible war, the 88mm flak gun and, even more sinister, endless canisters of Zyklon-B. God help us.

Or, barring Him, may young people save us. When they were young, my parents’ generation did exactly that.